Recently, a vast amount of information about a multitude of different types of topics has become accessible through searches using search engines on networks. Some search engines have been configured to provide fast responses to search requests while retrieving highly clustered and indexed sets of links. The links may be prioritized by the number and kind of websites that link to them. These types of search engines may perform different website identification and organization, for example, web crawling, sorting and normalizing website links, and prioritizing website links.
In some situations, the search engines may provide results which are either too narrow, providing only a small number of websites with meaningful content, or too broad, providing a quantity of websites so large that it may become cumbersome trying to search every website for meaningful content. Furthermore, search engines generally do not provide orientation around a topic, and even searches on synonymous words for the same topic can produce drastically different results. And since search results are generally not oriented by topic, the ability to navigate between related topics may not be available.
Some emerging search engine technologies, such as Google Co-op, are, however, beginning to enable humans to index websites with certain topic-specific metatags that then facilitate topic-to-topic navigation. Related is the way in which systems, such as inventory systems, organize data. While historically these systems have relied upon proprietary database schemas to store data, enabling retrieval through proprietary search queries, emerging information retrieval technologies are enabling faster retrieval of this information and even more intuitive display through the use of synonyms and topic-to-topic relationships and navigation.
Thus, due to the emergence of search technologies that utilize synonyms and topic-to-topic relationships to facilitate better information retrieval and display, there is a need for a system and method that can facilitate the creation of definitive, trusted “knowledge structures” of synonyms between terms for a given topic, and of reltionships between topics. Such a system and method used to formalize a knowledge structure might be used by a person or groups of persons considered trusted to establish such structures, or might be used in a more open, collaborative way, enabling a large number of users of a network to formalize the knowledge structures through more mathematical formalization processes.
For example, knowledge structures may be created by a group of networked individuals using the knowledge structure creation and management system, and the resulting knowledge structures may then be used to facilitate information retrieval, such as for use in a search system or in an inventory management system.
In one aspect of the system, concepts and events may be linked temporally via the knowledge structures and searching the knowledge structures may result in a timeline of events that may be displayed to a user. The timeline may include events that relate to a concept temporally and according to other relationship types. The temporal linking of concepts may facilitate intuitive searching between concepts that may be linked through time.
Further, in another aspect of the system, users may continuously manage the system by revising knowledge structures within the system. Knowledge structures may be updated by creating or changing links between elements, adding new elements, removing links, and removing elements. Moreover, the management process may be conducted through the collaborative efforts of users of the system.